"Our" house

This is a picture of the house (the one farthest right) the three of us will be living in. It was taken last summer from a road that runs a loop from the seminary campus around a few houses and a small Cameroon Baptist Convention college.

News...and more from Andrew Walls

Well, we've finally found out which specific courses we'll be teaching at CBTS. I'll try to post the titles in the next couple of days. Pray that we'll have some good, productive prep time in the six weeks or so we have left before we leave. (Still can't believe how soon it will be!)

Also, pray for (what seems like) thousands of details that have to be taken care of by then. We just got an email today from the Baptist General Conference detailing all the stuff for visas, health insurance, travel plans, etc., that we need to iron out. Our contact with the BGC is hoping to have all our visa apps and insurance forms turned in by the first week of July. So pray for that too, when you think of us.

I'll leave you with another provocative quote from Andrew Walls, the missiologist I've been enjoying so much recently. I'm still really excited by his thoughts on how the African church so closely resembles second-century Christianity. Here are his words:

"Our knowledge of the early church prior to the Council of Nicaea in 325 is fragmentary, but the fragments reveal many of the concerns African churches have today, from distinguishing between true and false prophets to deciding what should happen to church members who behave badly. Even the literary forms are often similar.... Reading the pre-Nicene literature and the literature of the European conversion period in the light of modern African experience cast floods of light. African and Asian Christians can vastly illuminate 'our' church history." (quoted in Jenkins, The Next Christendom, 135)

Pretty cool, huh?

More soon.

-Wes, for the guys

Insights from a former missionary to West Africa

I’m reading Andrew Walls’ The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Orbis, 1996) right now. Walls is a Scottish missiologist who spent several years teaching church history in Sierra Leone, became a student of African Christian history while he was there, and has thought deeply about the process of communicating the gospel cross-culturally. He’s been helping me as I think about some of the challenges the three of us will face next year in the classroom, chapel, and church sanctuary in Cameroon.

One of Walls’ main points, reiterated throughout the book, is that African Christianity finds itself at a similar point as the largely Gentile Christian church did in the second century A.D. as it parted ways with---and eventually eclipsed---Jewish Christianity. This is an amazing and very stimulating thought for me! If Walls is right, then being part of the church in Cameroon for a year will place Tommy, Charlie, and me in an environment much the same as that of some of the earliest forms of Christianity, when questions of faith and practice were being worked out for the first time in a cultural context different from that of the original Christian communities.

Here are some provocative quotes from Walls. Be stimulated!

--Wesley, for the team


I still remember the force with which one day [while I was in Sierra Leone] the realization struck me that I, while happily pontificating on that patchwork quilt of diverse fragments that constitutes second-century Christian literature, was actually living in a second-century church. The life, worship and understanding of a community in its second century of Christian allegiance was going on all around me [in African churches]. (xiii)

The exponential growth of the Christian in the African continent in the past century or so seems to me to raise the question whether this massive encounter with a new body of thought and network of relationships may not be as determinative of the future shape of Christianity as was the [initial early Christian] encounter with the Greek world. (xviii)

[In the second century, the Greek] system of thought apparently so assured and final, had to go to school again with Christ. The process altered the expression of the Christian faith completely; for the word of Christ had now to be introduced into areas of thinking, and brought to bear upon ideas that Peter and John and James the Just never dreamed of and that Paul himself barely glimpsed.
It was impossible either to ignore the previous system of ideas, or to abandon it, or to leave it as it was. It had to be penetrated, invaded, brought into relation with the word about Christ and the Scriptures which contained it. The process meant a new agenda for Christianity. Matters which had never troubled the heads of the apostles and elders of Jerusalem became matters of life and death as the word about Christ encountered the established metaphysic of the Hellenistic world, while many things which were vital to the first generation of Christians in Jerusalem just dropped out of sight….
In our own day there are signs that African theologians are at a similar point in the application of the word about Christ to another vast complex of thought, action, and relationships to that which Greek Christian thinkers reached when they faced the problems posed by their cultural identity. Christian Africa is now having to grapple with the meaning of the African past, and with what God was doing in it…. (53)

While some of the features of the evangelical religion that originated the missionary movement---certainly the high place given to Scripture and the recognition of immediacy in personal experience---have been regular features of African Christianity, it is important to note that the fruit of the work of evangelical missionaries has not simply been a replication of Western evangelicalism. The Christian message that they set loose in Africa has its own dynamic, as it comes into creative and critical encounter with African life with its needs and its hurts…. Africans have responded to the gospel from where they were, not from where the missionaries were; they have responded to the Christian message as they heard it, not to the missionaries’ experience of the message. (100-101)

Together for graduation

Two weekends ago the three of us graduated from The Bethlehem Institute, which most of you know is a two-year leadership development program at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis. Our families came for the graduation. It was a great chance for our parents and siblings to meet and get to know the other guys who will be spending a year with their sons in Cameroon! Here's a picture of us all together.

Learning about Cameroon-ians

Having been to Cameroon last summer, Charlie and Wes are a bit more knowledgeable than me about the country and the people, and sometimes they've had to graciously correct my mistakes.

Here's an excerpt from an email exchange between Charlie and me a couple months ago. In preparation for an upcoming presentation about our trip, I suggested an outline over email. I wrote:

....Then, Wes, you could transition to present the theological ground for our trip. You could repeat the same thing you said as you prayed for Cameroon and our trip yesterday. God is calling a people to Himself around the globe. You could mention how many Cameroonies (sp?) who come to the school have been touched by the Holy Spirit and have a zeal for God, but cannot even explain the gospel. This can be brief but bold.

To this, Charlie replied:

Suggestion/modification:

Wes: I would subtly suggest that you NOT call residents of Cameroon "Cameroonies," but maybe something more like "Cameroonians." Otherwise they sound like small candies, perhaps even with chewy centers. Chewy marshmallow centers. mmmm...

-c

I'm sure some Cameroonians have accidentally called us "Americanies" before, so I don't feel too bad.

--tg, for himself, obviously